The true cost of cheap food

[Music]

it was late june 2020

fresh city the urban farm an organic

grocery company i had founded

had its best sales quarter ever with the

onset of the lockdown

demand for our delivery service went

through the roof

driving through deserted city streets

our drivers delivered thousands of

orders

all over the city grateful customers

scribbled handwritten notes of thanks

and tucked them into ziploc bags we had

persevered during a very challenging

time

yet i felt defeated with the pandemic

still raging on

and protesters in the streets demanding

racial equality

the big grocers all withdrew their

coronavirus premium pay

in my heart i knew what that meant we

would have to withdraw our own

two dollar per hour top up we’d be

paying our staff during the pandemic

i just couldn’t see a way to make the

numbers work

we wouldn’t be able to institute a

higher wage without increasing prices

and then losing customers to the big

guys

i asked myself what was the point of

starting

an impact-focused business if i couldn’t

even pay my staff a living wage during

the greatest public health crisis

of a century but then i realized the

truth

the price of food is not right i cannot

afford to pay all my staff a living wage

with prices where they are you

me us will all need to pay more for food

now you’re probably thinking to yourself

this guy’s a grocery executive

of course he wants me to pay more for

food but hold on hear me out

a decade prior i arrived in new york

city to practice investment law

at the time every person with a pulse in

the united states of america

could get a mortgage bankers and lawyers

made a killing

bundling these mortgages together and

selling them off

until quite suddenly the music stopped

almost overnight 19 trillion dollars of

household wealth evaporated as housing

prices plunged

around that time i started reading about

food

now this may seem obvious to you but the

8 billion of us here on earth

we depend on a few top inches of topsoil

in the right climate in the hands of the

right farmer in order to eat every day

literally half the land on earth is used

for food production

and what i was reading felt eerily

familiar

even though supermarkets boasted a

bounty of food from all over the world

and food conglomerates were raking in

billions

all was not well what you have to

appreciate

is that food today is historically cheap

we spend just eight percent of our

incomes on food

our grandparents spent a quarter

some of the reason food is cheap is

because of great innovations

things like irrigation plant breeding or

mechanization

but some of the reason food is cheap

today is because of reasons are much

harder to swallow

things like poultry wages at the farm

job insecurity

up and down the food chain cruelty to

animals

at an immense level and environmental

degradation

at a planetary scale these innovations

seem cheap in the short run but they’re

going to cost us in the long run

just like the financial crisis the bill

will come due

at the time i thought you can tackle

these issues we just need to care

i an investment lawyer with zero

experience in food

or farming would start an urban farm in

my hometown of toronto

and the truth is the decade since has

shown me caring does make a difference

we’ve done great things like put salads

and meals in glass jars

and deliver them to our customers so

those jars can be reused

we’ve extended health and dental

benefits to all of our staff

we hire staff on payroll rather than

using temp agencies

we source as locally as we possibly can

and we source exclusively 100 grass-fed

beef which is better for the animal

better for the environment and better

for your health

while we’re not perfect we’ve definitely

moved the ball forward now with eight

stores

thousands of deliveries and a humming

commissary kitchen

but what got me on that day in june was

that after all these years of trying

all these years of caring we still

weren’t able to pay all of our staff a

living wage

i felt that i let down my staff and i

let down a lot of the people that were

rooting for us

but the truth is a just food system

cannot be based on cheap food

we’ve entered into an implicit bargain

with a food system

we’ve essentially said hey miss grosser

he missed a big box store

you get us cheap food and as long as it

doesn’t make us sick right away

we’ll just look the other way so you

walk into that store

and you see an eight dollar rotisserie

chicken great deal right

eight dollars and you’re halfway to

dinner for several people

but what was the true cost of that eight

dollar chicken

it means chickens confined to an eight

and a half by eleven space for their

whole lives

chickens debeaked at birth chickens

pumped full of antibiotics

just so they can survive these hostile

conditions

it means paltry wages from that

processing plant

all the way to the checkout counter the

true cost of that chicken

is far more than eight dollars

have you had a tomato this week the

farmer that cokes that tomato out of the

ground

she doesn’t own that land she’s not even

a citizen

of the country on which that land sits

she makes low wages

works long hours and has no job security

at fresh city we have a good sense of

how labor is treated at the farms from

which we

source because they’re local but in the

winter

when we’re buying certified organic

tomatoes from florida

we have much less sense

if we want things like a living wage a

cleaner environment

and humane treatment of animals we’re

all going to have to pay more for food

the tragedy of it is we can afford it

countries not that dissimilar from us

countries like

japan or france or holland spent up to

50 percent more on food than we do

and that’s not even to talk about the

immense amount of food waste in our

system

we canadians are amongst the world’s

worst culprits when it comes to food

waste

your compost bin could essentially be an

atm with the thousands of dollars you

throw away

into it every year what about those less

fortunate

who cannot afford food even at today’s

prices

won’t a higher price of food make it

even worse for them

the sad truth is that today 100 000

people in toronto will go out to work

put in a good day’s work and still not

be able to afford

the basic necessities of life that’s not

a price of food problem

that’s an inequality problem

so what do we do about cheap food first

we can act as consumers

exerting power through the marketplace

you can do things like

buy more local more organic buy less

meat

buy better quality meats but the reality

of it is

we’re not going to end cheap food simply

by shopping in a farmers market

or with fresh city for that matter we

need to make a shift from acting as

consumers

to acting as citizens citizens change

the very

nature of the marketplace by changing

the rules of the game

how do you do that you challenge power

wherever it resides you talk to the most

powerful people you know

politicians school trustees who control

our cafeterias

grocery executives if you’re a kid talk

to your parents

talk to your teacher and tell them two

things

first tell them that we have to increase

minimum wage

and end the shoddy way we treat migrant

laborers in this country

i want to pay my staff a living wage but

i can’t do that

as long as the big grocers and other

retailers don’t match that wage

i’d go out of business pretty quickly

government needs to step

in and set some standards

the second thing we need to tell these

powerful people

is that we have to end the factory

farming of animals

there is simply no nutritional reason

for eating as many animal products and

meat

as we do today government needs to

regulate the humane treatment of animals

animal factory farming is a moral stain

on our country

and our generation

what seems cheap individually is killing

us collectively

we’re not getting value for money

for people and for planet we all need to

pay more for food